Life, Family, Yoga, Stuff

Tag Archives: barbie

I love ebay and we just made quite the haul. Lauren has a lot of toys. We were gifted an older Fisher Price Loving Family dollhouse when she was 5 or 6. It had no furniture, so I browsed thrift shops for stuff that would go with it. Of course, some was purchased brand new, but the majority of it came from the junk stores. We just unloaded all of it, for $244.98 and to think I was going to send this back with my mom to Florida for my neice! We did let her have the dollhouse, didn’t want to try and ship that sucker! Someone paid $51 for this camper, the tent, the bicycles and a couple of boats. So if you’re out at a garge sale or Goodwill, Fisher Price Loving Family, old or new is not a bad investment!

I used to sell a lot of dishes. I scoured flea markets and second hand shops for dishes with unique stamps on the back. I had a guide book I’d take with me. Though sometimes, you could just pick up a basic piece of china and make good money off it because someone out there had broken a piece or just simply wanted an extra. The second hand shops have since wised up. Goodwill in Ft. Myers actually has it’s own auction service now, as I’m sure lots of other Goodwill’s do too. When I finally sold off what I could sell, I got rid of what I could in the garage sale and took the rest back where I got them. It was fun while it lasted, to purchase a plate for a quarter and sell it for $10 or more.

My sister has recently jumped on the e-bay bandwagon as well. They are having financial difficulties and the thought of losing a beautiful home is not very pretty. Everything she owns in the way of clothing is J. Jill, Prada, Banana Republic, and brands that I’m sure I don’t know of. She’s doing really well with it and realizing that you really don’t need 37 pairs of shoes. I don’t have any high dollar clothing to resell, but I’m also not in a bad financial situation so at times, I’m thankful for my low grade and probably bad taste. I do trade a lot of my yoga stuff on e-bay as I get sick of wearing the same stuff all the time. I also find brands like Lululemon, Ebb & Flow or Be Present, none of which are available at stores in our areas. They still aren’t cheap, but 1/2 or a tad more of what you’d pay in the stores. Most of it comes to me new with tags!

The most fun my sister and I had on e-bay was selling off our childhood toys. We had a massive Dawn Doll collection that brought huge bucks! We also had these cool little dolls, that smelled good and were packaged in perfume bottles. I can’t remember what they were called. One of those alone, brought $80. We had lots of Barbie stuff and dealing Barbie can be fun if you know what to look for. I used to buy big lots of clothes at the junk stores or even on e-bay just because I recognized one piece in there that was worth bucks. One time, I bought a paper bag of Barbie clothes on ebay. Inside, was the original Pan American circa 1966 flight jacket for Barbie. I cleaned it and sold it online for $60.

Another great outfit I found complete was Barbie’s Lamb & Leather outfit, circa 1970. You have to be careful now as most of these outfits are being reproduced.

It was all white and it came to me totally trashed. One safe and good way to clean old fabrics of a lighter color is to soak them in Polident. Be sure to use a glass bowl, cold water, and one or two Polident tablets. Let them soak overnight. Rinse in cool water and let them dry flat on a towel. The results are amazing, crisp, clean color! I never pressed any of my older Barbies clothes for fear of disentegration, but steam will work well. I ended up receving $90 for this outift in 2001, complete minus the gloves!

You can use Polident for all different colors as well. Just be sure to do a batch of red by itself, blue by itself, do not mix colors!

I haven’t sold any Barbie stuff for a very long time. I do have a wonderful old Barbie case, complete with a couple of vintage dolls and a bunch of the theater costumes, a wedding dress, an original bathing suit and a bunch of accessories. I scored most of that on ebay as well, got sidetracked and have never sold it. OK. Maybe I got a bit attached to that, but it’s probably time for it to go.

The holidays, yep that’s when I’ll get it outta here!

The weirdest thing I ever sold was an old pair of tennis shoes. Someone made a joke to me that I should put them on ebay, in the adult section. The adult section? Ebay has an adult section? Why yes, yes they do. I got a secondary ebay identity and I started the auction out of curiosity. I sold them, for $52 and the guy also asked me if I would throw in a pair of socks, that were not washed. I got creeped out but I did it and mailed them with no return address.

Someone I know, knows someone that’s living in Japan. She puts her underwear in vending machines there. Really, not kidding. She sells them for around $60 U.S. What in the hell is up with that?

I know. You’re probably wondering what kind of people I know……….and I just mentioned Fisher Price and underwear in vending machines in the same post…….

Our daughter is about to turn 11, tween central. She’s still into toys, mainly Littlest Pet Shops and Barbies. Over the break, she wanted to blow her holiday loot (of course) on something I refused to get her for Christmas. That would be the Littlest Pet Shop Fitness Center.

Never mind we already have around 5 buildings for the 250 + pets she already has! I will say they are cute, they are inexpensive and they do not take up much space. This Fitness Center was a must have for it came with a kangaroo wearing boxing gloves and a guinea pig. They suck you in with these special edition pets.

The cost for this piece of painted plastic? $47.97, not kidding. We got it home New Year’s Eve day. She got it out of the box herself, it took about an hour. One of the doors, was missing the little pegs in order for it to swing. Major disappointment. On top of that, it was much lighter in weight than some of the other smaller buildings she already owned. It cost $47.97, we’re taking it back.

Out we went, the same day/evening to return it. They let us open the new one, to make sure the door would attach and we brought it home. Again, one hour to get it out of the box. This time, the spinner that allowed the pets to leap over the hurdles, would skip and not turn. Also, it featured pegs, instead of magnets so the only pets that could use this fitness center piece of crap, were the two pets that came with it!

How would our other 250 pets be able to work out?

For those of you that are LPS uninformed, all the pets have magnets in their feet. All of their building also have magnets, so everyone can join the party. This was a horror to discover no magnets! Were they now making pets without magnets? Pets with holes in their bums to fit a peg? I did what any person would do at this time of grief. I phoned a friend, my sister. Wow. She’d bought the same Fitness Center for her daughter and it has magnets!

I informed Lauren we would be taking this back on Friday, January 2 as I had the Mala on New Year’s Day. She was not a happy camper, but she survived. Friday came. We drove to the store, got our cash back and this time, she decided to spend $10 on a Littlest Pet Shop (stuffed animal) V.I.P. which is like a Webkinz.

You get online with your animal, build a room and enjoy Pet Shopville on the computer. She chose the turtle, she had $40 left, she was happy and so was I. Needless to say, when we arrived home she headed to the computer and discovered that SOMEONE had TORN the tag offf with the CODE that you NEED in order to get online!!!! I on the other hand, by now, was more than ready to ban all LPS toys from our home by placing them in our burn barrel and breathing in the toxic smoke!

Within an hour, we were having lunch at a Chinese buffet, laughing about it on the way to the return counter once again. I left the kids in the car (15, 14 and 10) while I stood in line for 20 minutes to get the $10 back on Friday, January 2 while the stores were still packed with holiday spenders. Since I had all these kids with me, we headed to UU Church to pick up 303 lbs. of food that we collected at the Mala and delivered it to Ozarks Food Harvest.

Early evening, I took Lauren out again, in search of that thing she needed to spend her bucks on. We left one store empty handed. The shelves were bare, people had spent their gift cards and she didn’t buy something just to be buying. I was proud of her. We then stopped at Toys R Us (my idea) on the way home. She browsed for an hour, I was about to drop dead.

She decided on a Barbie Disco Cruise Ship/Airplane combination. “Look mom, it’s the last one, marked down from $74.99 to $39.99, that’s good isn’t it?” It was the size of the LPS Fitness Center, but weighed a ton more. Thank you Mattel for quality!